Last Thursday afternoon Baby Chickadee decided to go sideways off the tall slide at Play Park Pointe, so instead of gracefully sliding off the end she landed facedown in the wood chips. I rocked her and kissed her forehead, and after her crying ceased I wasn’t terribly concerned because she ran off to play with her friends. That is, I wasn’t terribly concerned until about 45 minutes later when she started asking for a nap (she rarely naps), and then when she started vomiting 20 minutes after that I freaked.

Good heavens I freaked.

I frantically made repeated phone calls to Baby Chickadee’s pediatrician, to my husband, to my sister-in-law Amanda, to my friend Sami, to my friend Chrissa, then to 911 for an ambulance, where a very kind and very calm police officer talked to me until a very kind and calm police officer came to my door and talked to me until two very kind and calm EMTs talked to me and took Baby Chickadee and me to the hospital.

(In all sincerity, I am so grateful for those officers and EMTs. Keeping me calm and letting me cry over my daughter’s concussion… I could hug every single one of them.)

A CT scan showed that everything in Baby Chickadee was fine, she’d just suffered a mild concussion. And by her spinning around the exam room and belting out “Let It Go” with her nurse at the end of our stay, I figured the CT was right.

The perks of your child suffering a not-too-serious concussion are that all screens have to be turned off for three to four days immediately following the trauma in order for the brain to heal. So when you tell the kids no iPods, no TV, no video games and they let out a little whine, you can just shrug your shoulders and say, “Sorry, doctor’s orders!”

But then of course you watch TV with your husband on the couch after the children are in bed, because come on, let’s not take this no-screens-thing too far.

The first morning after Baby Chickadee’s concussion Hubby and I laid in bed and listened to the children all playing sweetly together downstairs. Usually they would have been bleary-eyed in front of the TV, slightly comatose and non-communicative from their night’s sleep, but that Friday morning they were up and giggling together, moving as a little pack from one room to the other. Legos here, wrestling there, ponies upstairs.

As the day went on and the kids continued to play nicely together, Hubby looked at me. “I’m probably going to give one of the kids a concussion each week, just so we can leave the screens off forever.”

Page 2 of 2 - You do what you gotta do.

Erin Fox is a busy wife and mother of three. She is a weekly columnist for the Times- Gazette.